


From the Ashes

by Elleth



Category: Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Comes Back Wrong, Faustian Bargain, Finnish Mythology & Folklore, Gen, Resurrection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-06
Updated: 2017-10-06
Packaged: 2019-01-07 11:29:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,048
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12231921
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elleth/pseuds/Elleth
Summary: There is a way to return Tuuri. Lalli takes it, even knowing the cost.





	From the Ashes

**Author's Note:**

  * For [straightforwardly](https://archiveofourown.org/users/straightforwardly/gifts).



> Thank you for the prompt! I had a ton of fun (and lots of walking through the dark muttering to get the plot in line, which also qualifies as fun in my book!) with this, and hope you enjoy this, insofar that darkfic is enjoyable!

Lalli willed himself into another burst of speed as the sun rose over the ice of Vejle fjord into a frosty sky clear of clouds. Somewhere on the other side of the water, if Lalli squinted, he thought he could see the house by the shore that Emil might be waking up in, alone in the makeshift shelter by the fireplace. Running seemed disgustingly normal for all that had happened since the giant's attack, but most of all this: When Lalli woke up it was with Tuuri's voice shrill and sad in his ears. He had not yet shaken the echo.

"Please take me home, Lalli! Are you here to take me home?" 

His heart had not let him decline, nor his sense of purpose - not after he had drifted endlessly until the whooping trumpet-call of the Swan of Tuonela roused him, and he found he could climb to his feet. Under them, the sheet of ice that separated the sleepers from the surface of the water, all pale faces beneath as far as his eye could see. After the first shock it had been Tuuri who had found _him_ , rising from the water to throw her arms around him and cling impossibly tight, dissolving into loud sobs that ripped at his insides and made Lalli wish he was drifting again.

At least that had been quiet and calm with only the stars and water for company. 

"Yes," he'd said, "I'm here to take you home," and doomed himself when the Swan beat her wings into the water in irritation, sternly sending Tuuri's still-restless, newly-dead spirit into its bed under the water again to tell Lalli that he had no place in Tuonela, not yet, and whatever his drifting, he should not yet have come. But Tuuri was his responsibility. He had been the one who'd been a second too late sensing the troll that had infected her. He'd not understood what she'd tried to tell him before she'd drowned herself. He'd not understood how serious she had been about this mission in the first place, or he would - for once - have concurred with Onni and done all he could to keep her in Keuruu. 

Onni would never forgive him his failure. He'd never forgive himself his failure.

He had to make up for it, and he'd taken his chance. He'd wagered all he could, buying Tuuri at least the promise of freedom before he woke, sent by a wave of the Swan's wing along the Birds' Path, back into his body and toward waking from the Haven that was miraculously unbroken. 

Through the trees ahead, he could see the glint of sun on metal: their tank still stood where they had left it. And nearby, extinguished in the incessant sleet of the day before and covered in a crust of iced-over snow, Tuuri's pyre. Approaching it, Lalli slowed to a walk, and found his focus. 

He knelt, touched his chest, laid his fingers in the snow, and began to chant before he'd fully recovered his breath. 

*

Sunrise; the second since he had left Emil. Lalli's voice had gone hoarse, and sleep dragged his movements into sluggish coordination. By the time the sun had climbed to midday, his song finished. Lalli felt hollow; the splintering ice and rumble of a stone falling from the pyre reverbrated through his chest.

There was nothing more to say or ask.

He should have cleared the rocks away first, Lalli thought, wiping at the irritating new trickle of blood from his nose over the crusted blood that had begun running while he sang, and shoved another of the rocks aside to roll down into the snow. The smell of burnt, bitter ash grew stronger, and he already began to fear he had made a mistake, that it hadn't worked, when a lock of bright, unburnt hair appeared in the gap the rock had left open. More, and Tuuri's face was free: black with soot, pale and lifeless under the gritty human grime, but whole and unburnt, round cheeks and closed eyes. 

Eventually Lalli could pull her fully from the pyre, ran his hands over her, finding her whole, still and lifeless. This, he thought, should have been more difficult - singing ashes back into their former shape, dividing wood and flesh and dirt where they belonged. But he knew Tuuri, how she had lived and died, knew the fire Emil had made, and he had spoken with the trees when he had looked for her, and heard their stories. The Swan had taught him the rest. 

His arms and legs were leaden with weariness. His hands itched with residual magic under his gloves. His eyes threatened to fall shut on their own accord. But he had thought it'd be harder. 

He fell asleep next to Tuuri in the snow, his head pillowed on the crook of her arm. 

*

It was entirely different guiding a soul back to life than it was to lead it to rest. He let sleep and the cold carry him to the shore of the river, and waited. There was no bargaining with Tuoni, Tuonetar and their kin, nor the Ferry Girl, nor anyone in Tuonela. 

Except for the Swan.

Where the gods of death were indifferent and only Kipu-tyttö wept at the work she was doing, the Swan still flew the Birds' Path between the living world and the Realm of Sleep. She still had a measure of compassion and longed for order that the Rash had not allowed in her bureaucracy for 90 years. This was why the Skalds of the Finnish military considered themselves in her service. This was why they wore her emblem on their uniforms. This was why Lalli had had one thing that he might offer, and not hesitated to do so.

If he died he'd die knowing he had saved Tuuri - and perhaps the world - by it.

The Swan came floating from the starless dark of the river, and riding in the plumage between her wings, a spot of radiance that resolved itself into Tuuri's shape. Unblinking, rigid bird-eyes fixed Lalli's with a golden glare that was luminous despite the scarcity of light, then the Swan bowed her head and drifted closer. Reaching the shore, Tuuri clambered over the rocks and threw herself forward into Lalli's arms, a translucent version of his cousing clinging around his middle - her arms reached all the way around him, and within moments she was weeping. 

Lalli let her. It was better that she did not hear what he had to say before his throat closed up with fear. 

"Will now see her safe recovered,  
Safe delivered to her body,  
Safe will lead her to her team-mates,  
Then shall bring you what I promised,  
Bring the serum that I spoke of,  
Hotakainen blood shall bring it.  
If I do not bring the medicine  
If my bargaining deceived you  
If indeed I should prove faithless  
Take her back and me take also  
To the depths of Tuoni's River  
To the kingdom of Manala."

The Swan did not speak in answer, but she laid her head in his outstretched hand, then turned and swam back into the dark, leaving no ripples in the water. Lalli could not help feeling pleased when Tuuri, once she calmed down and found they were alone, gave him a wide-eyed look and followed after him faithfully, clasping his hand so tightly it hurt. 

He ignored her claim that he was crying. 

They were going home. Or at least the closest to home that he could bring her at this time.

Waking in the snow, a single white pinion feather lay sharp-edged and pristine in Lalli's palm, a reminder of the promise he'd made the Swan. He slipped it deep into his pocket before it could blow away.

Next to him, Tuuri stirred to life. 

*

The team had left the tank a shell of itself. 

The books were gone, of course - at least most of them were, all the most valuable ones. Their supplies, what had been left at all, had been used up, excepting a handful of tuna cans that hadn't fit into Mikkel's plastic buckets of soup. They had taken all but Tuuri's of the spare uniforms, most of the ammunition, and most of Emil's supplies. 

A sharp reminder: Emil. Lalli had nothing to console himself with except the knowledge of the map he had found in Emil's bag. Before he'd left, he'd scouted out a safe route for Emil that should bring him close enough to the rest of the team to follow their tracks again, had marked it all with arrows pointing at the pickup spot in Horsens harbour just in case, and left trusting that if Emil kept to daylight, he should by now be back with Sigrun and the rest of them. Better than to have Emil distract him. Better than to have Emil question them. Lalli was not sure he could have done it under Emil's scrutiny.

Lalli had just finished his inventory of the tank's storage compartment when the whole contraption shuddered under him, lurched in an explosion, and went still again. 

Outside, he heard Tuuri coughing through a cloud of smoke. She'd only just washed and dressed in her off-duty clothing that they'd chosen to leave behind, and was already covered in soot again as she wormed out from under the tank's fallen hood. 

"I don't think I can fix it. I said so before," she added almost petulantly, wiping at her face, and seemed to freeze for a moment, staring into nothingness. Lalli wondered if she had an idea. 

" _Try,_ " he said, putting emphasis on the word. "If we have to walk we won't make it. The city is bad, and it's too far to go around." 

Tuuri scratched at the side of her neck, where Lalli knew the Rash still showed. He trusted that it would heal now that she had come back - the body was _new_ , there should be no trace of it that was still infectious, but it left a lingering feeling of dread itching at the back of his own mind.

"I'll _try_ ," Tuuri said, mimicking his tone to mock. Lalli shrugged and walked off. At least she was going to try. It didn't matter that the tank looked like it had the Rash itself, along the dented side of the vehicle that the flames had scorched. What mattered was that Tuuri would get it running again in time, and that he'd see her home safely.

But he still needed the serum that the team had found. 

*

By nightfall, Tuuri had given up on the tank, dropped her tool-belt where she'd stood, and gone to bed still scratching her neck. 

Lalli had not found the serum, at last deciding that the team must have taken it, even though Tuuri had told him that it was a fluke, the first evening after she'd been bitten. It was a fluke that killed the patients it had been tested on. 

He'd made the bargain knowing that. He'd counted on Tuuri to rig the tank back into shape, drive a day or so until they caught up, and then to slip away. People disappeared during scouting, all the time. It didn't make a difference how, and if he tested the serum on himself, he might be able to tell the Swan where the medics at the end of the world had gone wrong. 

Then he'd sleep. 

He rolled himself under Emil's bunk and shrugged his uniform coat over himself as a blanket - the team had taken most of those as well, and Tuuri had stolen herself the one spare they'd forgotten - and went to sleep with a noise of dissatisfaction, half-expecting the Swan to find him and claim her due already. 

His sleep was deep and dreamless, but he heard - or thought he heard - the voices of trolls near and far, clear and faint, a curious uproar about the passage of living things and magic in and around the city, and a faint, oddly familiar whisper among them that he couldn't place.

* 

Lalli woke to the rumble of the door, blinked, and was briefly confused by how familiar waking in the bunk was. 

He poked out his head into the dim bunk room. Tuuri's bed was empty, the blanket lay on the floor, still warm to the touch. He thought that perhaps all she'd done was step out, but when she didn't return after a while - not long, but long enough for the morning twilight to brighten a little, Lalli took his rifle, slipped outside after her and followed the fresh trail of her footsteps through the newly-falling snow in direction of the pyre. 

The pyre. No longer Tuuri's pyre. 

He spotted her stiff back and the hand in her hair when he entered the clearing. The falling snow muffled all the sounds like it usually did, and at first he couldn't tell if she was crying or just sniffling from the cold, but he sensed more than he saw the distress on her mind, then saw that the cloud of her breath in the cold air came irregularly. She was crying, half-turned to the path down to the shore. 

If she wanted him to help her - Lalli knew that, because she'd done it so often - she'd come to him. He slunk out of sight behind a tree. Unless she tried anything, best to leave her alone and let her calm down. She'd died, and come back. Perhaps a dream had had its claws in her. Onni would do much more than crying. He just had to make sure no passing beast met them at unawares - it was too cold for trolls to go roaming. 

When Lalli sensed the sun creeping over the edge of the world, Tuuri turned back and headed toward the tank at a run. 

*

By midday, it had stopped snowing. By nightfall, just after Tuuri had finished another frustrating day of tinkering, replacing scorched parts with something that she gutted from other sections of the motor, and sat down heavily on the hood to poke at the can of tuna Lalli had brought her, the tank roared to life suddenly and briefly. 

By morning he knew it'd been a false hope. Tuuri couldn't get it to start again, so Lalli strapped his rifle to his back, packed what little food they had, and dug Tuuri's mask out of the heap of snow it lay buried in.

"We'll walk," he said, handing it to her. "We have to. We've tried long enough. We'll have to keep moving through some nights to make up time. Vejle is going to be hard, but it should be fine when we're out of the town. The countryside is safer, especially if the weather holds. We won't try and find the team; I know where the pickup spot is. If we miss the ship... " 

Pale-faced and her smile thinner than before, Tuuri strapped the mask back on. "... we'll be stuck out here, and you tried all in vain." When she said it, it sounded like a certainty, not a possibility. 

"No," Lalli said. "I'll find a way. I always do."

She took his hand as they set out toward Vejle and clutched it more tightly the deeper into town they came. Without stopping, Lalli led her past the ruined house that had been the giant's hiding place, picking a way across the torn-apart debris that it had scattered into the street - blocks of brick wall, support beams, broken glass that clung like daggers to shattered window frames. Lalli helped Tuuri across an obstacle, feeling her grip tighten as she dropped down into the snow. Her face was tight, and her eyes wide and scared, trained first on Lalli as he slid down after her, and then to the houses that lined the street, still more or less intact.

Lalli followed it - had she seen something in the windows? Even days later the voices of the trolls nearby kept babbling, calling out to - Lalli supposed - the giant. Distress tinged the noise, but none of them seemed to have noticed their passage - yet. 

The facades lay quiet. Beyond them, the voices kept talking. 

_Så KOldT… vINDeN eR sÅ koLdt…_

_heY? hEYyy? er DU DeR? HEeyY?_

_SHut uP! pLeASe!!_

_hveM… hVem sAGde dEt?_

Like a thunderclap, silence settled. Something moved behind a window, past rows of withered flower-pots. Tuuri sobbed behind her mask, but there was no time now. Lalli pulled on her hand, and they ran.

*

They had to slow to a walk eventually, in a sun-drenched parking lot in between the ancient husks of cars. Lalli pulled Tuuri down into a crouch in the snow in between them, where she sat misting the inside of her mask with her gasping, her hands clutching her knees. 

Nothing, when Lalli dared a look back, was following them. Perhaps the cold had deterred the troll from leaving its nest, or it had been too weak to break through the shopfront glass. He breathed easier - for a second. Then Lalli reached, and without prior warning yanked down the turtleneck of Tuuri's shirt.

She only looked at him, didn't even try to fight him. 

Somehow, that unsettled Lalli more than the Rash that stood out even against her flushed neck when it should have receded since he had brought Tuuri back. Perhaps it could have gone away completely. It should not have been there in the first place when he had sung her body back into… 

The thought gripped Lalli like cold hands squeezing his stomach from the inside. 

… into its former shape. 

The world carried on in spite of his realization, and eventually when Tuuri's gasps subsided, it was her who pulled Lalli to his feet with a smile that it was as bright as it was fake. She tugged her shirt back into place, scratched, and started further down the road, but when she was ahead of him and her back turned, Lalli could see the tension in her shoulders.

For the first time Lalli noticed that she kept to the shadows. 

*

They walked through the night, with brief rests to share bites out of a can of tuna. Lalli ate sparingly - if Tuuri was going to heal, she'd need it, and the taste made him so sick that only necessity kept the food down. But where Lalli was trying not to falter, instead of getting tired, Tuuri's walk became more fluid the closer to evening they came, keeping up with him more easily than during the daylight. He held her hand again, once again leading since they'd left the city and the sprawling outskirts north of it. Lalli was quietly relieved that the roads all bent inland at this point. If Tuuri's fake cheer broke and the innocuous smiles she gave him whenever he turned around faltered, she would have to run far longer to reach the sea. 

The night didn't bother him. He was used to it, even in an unknown country. He had expected Tuuri to be less easy, and more than that, to be too exhausted to move another step. Instead she kept up with him, and they walked next to each other quietly for a while. The knot that had tightened in Lalli's chest since his realization, and every painful heartbeat after, eased somewhat. He hadn't known that Tuuri's company, when she was calm and quiet, could actually be nice.

"Don't leave me again. You don't know what I did to bring you home," he said just in case, the first time he stumbled with weariness in the early hours of the morning. They were on an old four-lane highway now, choked with cars that had tried to abandon Vejle, and flat, ancient farmland and scattered trees to the left and right of them.

"What _did_ you do?" Tuuri asked. She was smiling at him again until his calm evaporated and his hand itched to slap the fake expression from her face. 

"Nothing." 

"I thought so." Something twisted in Tuuri's features for a second, a brief hardness in the smile that became apparent before her face smoothed it over. "What _if_ I run off again? I did… that... so I could die as myself. You know why. You were _there_!" Tuuri's voice broke, but it took her only a moment to control herself again. 

Truth to be told, Lalli tried hard not to remember Saimaa. He couldn't allow it, not when people put their trust in him. Not when lives depended on him. But she was right; he had been there. "I thought… it was different. I didn't repeat Grandma's mistake." 

He breathed. Breathed again. Kicked at a clump of snow. Breathed. 

Tuuri watched him. Lalli breathed another time, in and out, before he could trust himself to carry on. He wanted Emil there with him now, Emil and his coat to hide under, but there was no saying where Emil was. Lalli's fingernails dug into the leather inside his gloves as he walked ahead, shook his head and stopped when he surveyed the horizon, seeing houses between the bare trees, snow on their roofs in the setting moonlight. 

"There's a town ahead. We should find an empty place to sleep. I'm tired." 

And he was. They made good a lot of ground. And he'd made a different mistake. He'd assumed that the bargain he'd made with the Swan would give him what he wanted. It had. But if he had phrased it more carefully… Tuuri could be okay. He wouldn't have to die for nothing. 

He had never been good at using his words. It had killed people before.

The thought had revolved endlessly in his head by the time they found shelter - not a town, and rather another industrial district much like the one he'd raided with Emil. They broke into an office, wrapped a large rug from the floor around themselves for some warmth, lying close together, and sleep pulled Lalli down into his Haven with regret and anger bitter on his tongue. 

Once, far away and halfway out of his dream. Lalli heard the guttural, garbling howl of some hunting beast, but it was too distant to pose any threat. When he woke, Tuuri was already sitting up next to him, and staring into the darkness before dawn with unblinking eyes. She was not smiling then; her face was blank and she seemed empty. 

"I'm sorry, Lalli," she said without looking at him. "I'm sorry." In his head he heard it repeated, loud and insistent, desperate, and terribly mutilated. 

_i'M sORrY, lALLI!_

* 

The next day on the road was much the same as the night before. They left Løsning's industrial patch behind at first light, although Lalli couldn't guess what the time was. The day was overcast and the sun shone like a rare coin through gloomy clouds when they saw it at all. Under this low veil full daylight seemed impossible, and by afternoon it had started snowing again. 

They stomped along the highway without talking, Tuuri trailing behind with her hands stuffed into her pockets, Lalli walking ahead even though his muscles ached from the trek. He was used to rigorous exercise in his running, not the inexorable plodding through the snowdrifts between car wrecks that they had settled into. If he could have bridged the distance between Vejle and Horsens running, he thought he might have done it quickly and with ease. Perhaps half the ache was because he longed to do it. The other part might be cold, or hunger, or fear. 

At least the land was empty. As they walked the road dove between tree-grown banks, a shelter from beasts that might have spotted them in a more exposed stretch, and from the worst of the wind rushing in from the sea to the east of them. Also a good shelter for beasts that had chosen the highway to prowl, Lalli thought gloomily. He could not help feeling watched with a growing unease in the pit of his stomach, although no signs pointed to any life around beside his own and Tuuri's, and that was, if anything, even more unnerving. There might always be _maahinen_ following, but he doubted they would be active, rather overwintering in their hiding places. 

Tuuri gave him dark looks from behind whenever he turned around. He strained his mind outward, brushing against the edges of hers, but found a barrier that she rigorously maintained, like some glassy cocoon where something awful and fleshy was growing. She should not be able to _do_ this, Lalli thought desperately - it reminded him of Onni's Haven and the permission he needed to enter, but Tuuri was not a mage, and it needed awareness and power to maintain something like the Haven manifesting in her mind.

But she seemed normal otherwise - whatever that meant with Tuuri at any given time, he still wasn't sure, if no less cold and miserable than he himself was. The crackling troll voice was there, but distant and indistinguishable as if spoken behind glass. For all the clouds trying to smother them, it was day.

For the first time since the battle - and before that, the first time since he had grown used to being a night scout - he dreaded the nightfall. 

Tuuri stared at him. A snowflake landed on the mouthplate of her mask, sitting for a moment, before a next warm breath from the inside crumpled it into a drop of water that dripped uselessly to the ground.

*

The next time they rested it was under the bridge of a crosswise road passing overhead. Lalli hesitated at first - something almost like physical disgust made him want to recoil from his cousin, but when he overcame the impulse, he pulled the neck of her sweater down again: Still the Rash, but at least, from what he could see, it remained that single large patch on the side of her throat. It was not spreading, or getting any worse. 

Tuuri slapped his hand away and turned her back to him. 

Still no apparent healing. Perhaps, he tried to tell himself, he was too impatient to find signs of it, but that moment, Lalli wanted again to start running and never come back. Instead he left the shelter and scrambled up to the higher road to look out, where he stood in the driving wind, sucking the frigid, salty air into his lungs. Below he could hear Tuuri laughing - or crying? He wasn't sure, with the wind tearing the sounds apart, and for all that she had smiled at him… 

He looked along the road ahead, wishing suddenly and intensely that the rest of the team were there. Someone there would understand Tuuri, in more sense than just a shared language, in all the ways he couldn't. 

It was futile, of course; there was no way the team had passed along the same road without leaving at least some signs. It had not snowed so much that their tracks would be completely erased if they'd passed along here a day or two ago. They could not have overtaken one another without noticing. 

Lalli huffed, leaned on the rusted railing, and scanned the way they had come. Apart from Tuuri's footsteps and his own snaking between the avalanche of abandoned cars and some animal tracks crossing the highway, it was utterly lifeless.

There was nothing for it. He'd have to wait until they met again, and keep walking until then. Without the serum he had no chance in the world, and it was the fourth day since Tuuri's return. The Swan, he thought, must be getting impatient, although how quickly time passed for a spirit he was not sure. He did not want to consider the thought that something might have happened to the rest of the team on whatever road they'd taken. That moment, he'd even have welcomed the sight of the other mage, even if he was tall and stupid. Most of all, he missed Emil, with a desperation that gnawed like hunger on his insides.

* 

The bridge was no place for a camp. Lalli tried to strike a fire with a piece of flint and his puukko, but it guttered out in the draft, and Tuuri shuddered back from it. He had left Tuuri the last can of tuna - hunger had closed his stomach since, but he recognized the lightheadedness that came before his reserves would falter, a memory of his arrival at Keuruu when the _Lumilintu_ pulled into harbour and none of them had thought to eat since their escape from Saimaa. 

They needed shelter, regardless. He had spotted a farm behind a hedge of bare trees from the bridge, one of many they'd passed, but farms were as bad as any place where a lot of mammals lived. Some always turned, and he wouldn't want to face a cow beast even if he were stronger. 

They walked well past nightfall again, until Lalli's foot, when he was trying to gauge the distance to the next underpass ahead, caught on some obstacle under the snow, and he pitched forward without the will to break his fall. For a moment he relished the shock of cold to his face, then even that failed to rouse him, and his eyes slipped shut into darkness.

*

He dreamt that he carved Tuuri's skull to be free of meat and contagion, and climbed a pine to send it to the stars, all the while knowing he'd doomed her. The ritual was not for humans, but Tuuri was no longer human. The Swan winged slow and shining overhead against a sky bright with the aurora.

In another he left his Haven and shouted for Onni until he was hoarse - nothing came out of the waters that time - but received no answer. Tuuri's Haven drifted in a misty haze nearby, and he could walk across without leaving the shallows, but the barrier didn't budge, and inside it Tuuri's study seemed empty, of either her or the thing he had felt growing in her mind. 

* 

Something hot and viscous was running down the bridge of Lalli's nose. Something pungent and metallic nudged against lips, liquid slipping into his mouth and coating his tongue with the taste. He swallowed reflexively, gagged, and opened his lips for more in spite of himself. Something was shoved between his teeth, more of the same. He rolled it around his tongue.

_eAT. pLEasE, LaLli! do YoU lIKE It? yOU dOn'T LiKE AnyTHIng uSualLY. i CAuGht thIS aLl foR yOU._

Blood, he realized. Some sort of meat, raw. Unabashed glee in Tuuri's voice, or in… the thing's that tried to pass for his cousin.

His hunger - the first sensation that registered, stinging like needles in his empty stomach - overrode any caution or disgust, and he opened his mouth for more, granted promptly. It went on for some time, and only belatedly Lalli realized he couldn't tell where he was - out of the worst cold into some shelter, and Tuuri's body was warm against him. He couldn't help a visceral, festering dislike to be in her arms, deeper than his usual aversion to being touched too much by anybody. Trying not to recoil, his senses propelled themselves into the distraction of taking stock of his surroundings. He lay half on tiled ground, a little wet. No trace of fire, no scent of burnt wood except what still clung to Tuuri, skin-deep and days old. There was a sour, organic smell in the air around them.

He could hear dripping in the background somewhere. Snowmelt? 

"I remembered," Tuuri's voice said, cheerful and a little wheedling. "When you were a baby and aunt… aunt… _your mom_ nursed you. You were all tiny and quiet, and grandma always said you were the runt of the litter. You looked like that when I brought you here. Come on, eat. You need the strength. We can't miss the ship." 

She nudged more meat against his lips and Lalli ate, and only belatedly realized that even though his eyes were crusted and sticky with sleep, he could open them. The first thing that swam into focus was Tuuri's face, and a fingerprint of blood on the glass pane of her mask, crusts of blood around her nostrils under the mask, her bright eyes and the smile she gave him. 

Half out of sleep, he reached for the side of her throat. His fingers curled around the material of the sweater, pulled, and found no change in the Rash. Only then he allowed himself to look around, if only to get away from the renewed realization that Tuuri wasn't healing. 

Water dripped from copious growths along the walls and ceilings, the pink of living flesh cushioning a sink, the remnants of a shower head, a toilet. Where a window allowed a little daylight into the room they receded, and the tissues had withered into a sickly grey where it touched them. 

A troll's nest. Tuuri had found them a troll's nest for shelter. And next to her lay a bloody heap of feathers - some brown and grey, some around the glassy-eyed head an iridescent green, the round yellow beak of a duck protruding from the mess, one bright orange foot, webbed. 

"Tuuri," Lalli managed, through the nausea that threatened to overwhelm him, and felt around his pocket for the Swan's feather that he had brought, the token of their bargain. "What did I do to you?!"

She smiled beautifully at him. 

"You saved me. You brought me back. And now I saved you."

_yOu SaVED Me. YoU BRoUghT mE BAck. anD nOW i saVeD YoU._

*

Lalli wondered if there was any point in still trying to reach the ship. 

Tuuri's body was not healing, and he couldn't tell how much of her mind was still her own. What happened to one happened to the other, and he wondered at last if it wasn't her body that had been her undoing, whether he had brought her back, but brought her back too soon, before sleeping in Tuonela had cleansed her mind of whatever the Rash had already crooked in her before her death, and now that her fear seemed to have abated, she was ready to embrace it fully. 

Tuuri hadn't taken his rifle from him. When she slept through the day, he'd felt around the remains of the dead duck for a bullet, and found none. The chambers of his rifle were undisturbed, it was as fully loaded as he always kept it. Had she caught it by hand, or found a dead one? There was a small lake near the spot where he had collapsed, he remembered from memorizing the map; he supposed it was possible. 

Even so, he liked even less that apart from Tuuri, he could hear others in the house - mere husks of themselves, wheezing the occasional question into the aether - who they were, what they were, who else was there, the ubiquitous plea for help. Lalli didn't answer, but the troll voice that sounded like Tuuri offered some comfort, and they quieted. 

He slipped out of her hold eventually, when he trusted his knees not to fail him, grasping his puukko in hand. A shadow scampered away hastily - a rat, perhaps, or a feral cat. Lalli didn't pay it any more heed as he searched the building. It became still in the house after that, apart from Tuuri's mind uselessly striking out to find the home's former inhabitants. 

After, wiping his bloody hands and knife clean in the snow, Lalli stood by the door, willing himself to run. He could not.

*

Nightfall sent them marching again. Lalli felt little better than before, and the day in the troll nest had put him on edge. He felt watched, again. Tuuri was crying quietly and levelled accusatory glances at him. "Ulla and Otto Kristensen," she said. "They didn't remember that, but I knew." 

Movement helped, a little. 

"Ulla and Otto," she said again. "Ulla and Otto, Ulla and Otto, Ulla and Otto," until the names stopped being names, or sounding like words at all. 

Lalli didn't listen, didn't want to listen. "You can still remember," he said. At that point, the road signs had begun to show an exit from the motorway. Horsens. Soon after the sign there were tracks crossing onto the motorway, skidding down the slope from the direction of a country lane that ran parallel a few kilometers east, but would soon plunge into the southern outskirts of Horsens while the motorway gave the city a wide berth until nearer to the harbour. Fresh tracks that neither he nor Tuuri had made. 

Neither of them had a wheelbarrow. They were two, not four people. 

Lalli's heart throbbed. Four people, that meant that Emil had managed to find them, even though the tracks that Lalli thought were his showed that he was limping rather than walking normally. Anything could have happened there - tripping over something under the snow and spraining his ankle, maybe simply walking his feet blistered, or he'd hurt himself breaking through the ice in Vejle harbour, almost seven days ago. Lalli wouldn't put any of that past Emil. No reason to assume worse. 

He could not wait to see Emil again. He hoped that they had lost the ghosts, or at least left them far enough behind to pose no threat. He could not say what to do with Tuuri. 

*

Tuuri had perked up since they'd found the tracks. She was hiding under hood and collar against the sunlight of the day, but seemed determined to put on a final burst of speed which Lalli didn't have the heart or strength for, so he trailed further and further behind. The sky was clear, the lane straight and free of car wrecks, and he breathed easier having her in his sight, but not as close. 

Tuuri was talking as she plowed ahead, animatedly and happily. Lalli didn't want to guess what she was talking to - herself, or more probably the white thing that rustled through the roadside snow in the high grass. Sometimes a flash of blue as if magic withered off it like an iridescent beetle wing, and Tuuri laughed. 

It meant, Lalli decided, that the incessant feeling of being watched on the road hadn't been without reason. A quiet voice in the back of his mind had warned him that he was becoming paranoid the same way Onni was, but he only needed to think of Tuuri to tell that it wasn't true. Still, finding out that he had been right held as little joy as finding that he had been paranoid, and meant worse. He wondered if this hard-to-see thing that kept her so engaged could be killed - it left tracks in the snow, those of a weasel or marten or mink, perhaps, so there must be something physical to it. Once or twice he reached around for his rifle, another time he stroked over the edge of the Swan's feather in his pocket, once even had his puukko in hand without conscious thought, finding it trained at the back of Tuuri's neck instead, a spot that would be swiftly fatal. 

He thought again over the runo he'd chanted giving the Swan his promise. Where he'd promised Hotakainen blood to come bearing the serum to her, more and more he suspected that the Swan, to accept his offer at all, must have wanted Tuuri back, and for him to realize that death was meant to be final - in some of the songs that he'd heard about Lemminkäinen's mother, no bee had come flying to her help, and her efforts at reviving her son had all been in vain. _Supposedly_ , his grandmother had said with her nose wrinkling in distaste. 

"Supposedly," Lalli muttered. He didn't like the moral any more than his grandmother did, but if it needed heeding… if it was that, and not some failing that he could have avoided by trying harder, he'd come to a decision when they reached the team and the serum was in his reach. 

Not much later, the tracks veered off the motorway again, toward the shore of a lake that meandered like a broad river almost to the harbour area of Horsens. 

They had almost reached the pickup spot. 

*

The ghost rune Reynir had invented displayed on the tent flaps when Lalli and Tuuri found them, but it looked smudged and impotent, intentionally and triumphantly. The wheelbarrow stood outside it, and sitting slumped against it with his rifle in hand was Emil, asleep on his watch. His face looked different - not older, but more worn, lined with loneliness and pain, and he was cradling a hurt knee to his chest - the reason sleep overwhelmed him, perhaps. The fire they'd had kindled to warm up - Lalli envied them; he was no longer sure what warmth felt like - had burned down to embers and a thin trail of smoke threading away into the bright night air where the Birds' Path hung like a moonlit cloud, and reflected on the ice of the lake.

Lalli shook his head against the memory of that night. It could easily be the shore of Vejle Fjord again, all stripped beech-trees and sandy hills on the far side of the water, the occasional pine shooting up high and dark like a spear into the night sky.

He stopped at the edge of the meadow by the water.

Tuuri came running back and seized his wrist, pulling him closer, and the… _thing_ that accompanied her slunk and bounded around Tuuri's feet in spite of the boils, scabs and blisters that broke through its pale fur as it moved. Now, if ever, was Lalli's chance, but it turned its eyes on him - Tuuri's cloudy blue-grey as much as Onni's owl had Onni's grey eyes, and Lalli thought he looked into a mirror image when his lynx came to him. 

Impossibly: Tuuri's luonto. 

_hELLo, LaLli,_ it said and pulled its chapped, blistered lips back into an eerily human expression of joy. Its voice crackled and flickered as though it sought to hold steady against the Rash that tried to overwhelm it. _dO yOu unDeRStAnd nOw? i wAs toO weAK To HolD ofF tHe INFecTiOn, bUt sInCe yOu broUghT hEr bOdy bacK, i ProTEcteD tUUrI aS beST i cOUld fRoM thE liNGeRiNg eFfects oN hEr mInD tHat cOulD noT bE erAsEd. i aM cAUghT hErE nOw. i cANnOT reCOveR wItHouT help._ Before he could blink, its claws scrabbled up his body, and the sour stench of rashed skin and the musky stink of the creature itself nearly made Lalli gag as much as its closeness when it draped itself over his shoulders, but it reminded him of childhood, sharing a bed with Tuuri and somehow liking it even though she kicked and stole blankets.

Tuuri's luonto. The pieces fell into place now. Her soul had protected her by taking the burden of the Rash from her, even if it couldn't fully heal or spare her, and with the force of magic that the Rash itself granted, she'd been able to raise her Luonto into the physical world, perhaps first when he had been unconscious - the nosebleed in the troll nest. The mink had caught the duck for him. 

Lalli scoffed, even though it made him want to cry at the same time with an unexpected surge of love for his cousin. Of course Tuuri would excel at anything she put her mind to, unlike him. It stung his pride at summoning his lynx and the toll it had taken in Copenhagen, even insubstantial as it had been, but Lalli could do nothing now but heed what Tuuri's mink had to say. 

"What next?" Lalli asked. The mink curled its tail up and laid its head on its paws, stretching over Lalli's shoulder. 

_i Do nOT WanT ThE SWan tO TakE hEr aNy MOre THaN yoU Do. iF yoU wANt HEr to Be fREe Of tHe rASh, YoU nEed tO sEnD mE aWaY. PlEaSe. HElp mE bEforE i lOse mY HoLd on iT. HelP me._

Tuuri stood with wide eyes to see them interact. 

"Lalli…" she said, her voice brimming with invisible tears suddenly. 

The mink stretched itself up; the crusted fur on its paw brushed against Lalli's cheek. He held himself very still, looking where the creature pointed. A high pine tree rose against the night sky, higher than any of the ones around, and his dream in the troll's nest came to Lalli again. He looked from Tuuri to the mink.

"I understand. I cannot _kill_ you, only this body - will you come back to her? Will Tuuri heal?" 

_iN tIme. OF CoURse sHe'Ll sLeEP uNTiL i Do. yOu KnoW wHaT iT Is lIkE."_

"It is nothing to be scared of," he said, to Tuuri more than to the mink. "You'll just sleep. And wake up and be hungry. By then you'll probably be on the ship, and the best thing to do in quarantine is to sleep, anyway," he said. It was supposed to be a joke, but Tuuri did not smile. 

*

The pine grew from the top of an old barrow lined with white stones. It felt strangely apt for Lalli to bury the mink's bones between its roots and heap earth firmly atop it, a good resting place before he took the cleaned skull and started climbing to find a suitable eastward-facing branch. 

Tuuri stood below, leaning onto the trunk of the tree. Strength was already leaving her; her white face was upturned and bright like a star in the dim.

The moment his chanting was over, a scampering streak of blue vanished into the sky. Down below, Tuuri stumbled and sat heavily in the grass. 

Above Lalli's head, the beat of white wings against the sky. From his vantage point, he could see the Swan of Tuonela come to claim her due, landing in a patch of water opening under her on the frozen lake.

He helped Tuuri to the tent, to sit outside by the dead fire. Her eyes were almost closed, and he easily pulled her forehead against his lips, lingering for maybe longer than he ought, the farewell he had had no chance for the first time. He walked to the wheelbarrow, found the box of syringes and slid one into the pocket holding the feather, knelt by Emil to take a long look at his face, the starlight gleaming in his hair, a flake of frost sparkling caught in it.

Quiet settled on Lalli.

A tap to the shoulder woke Emil, Tuuri in his line of sight. Lalli ducked around the tent behind him. With the distraction she posed - and he heard Emil's confused shouting - they might not even think to look for him as he walked to the shore, through winter sedges crackling as they parted to let him pass.

Good. He'd be hidden from view on this sliver of beach. The Swan drifted closer, the ice dissipating in her approach. Lalli came to kneel before her, the ice uneven and knobbly against his knees, and held up the vial as proof.

"Have delivered her as promised  
Safe delivered to her team-mates,  
And am bringing you the serum  
Yours to study as I promised  
Yours perhaps to find solutions  
To the Rash, the plague of mankind.  
Hope that if it proves effective  
If it serves to grant your wishes  
That I may go back to see it  
See the world again made peaceful  
Meet my kin in joy thereafter."

The Swan reached out her wing, the lightest touch against his hair. A promise. Perhaps. _If._

Time slowed, flowed like honey, and then stilled entirely. Lalli could hear his own breathing loud in his ears - the last breaths, perhaps, that he would ever take. He studied the clear liquid in the syringe against the star-studded sky, looked back to perhaps catch a glimpse of the tent, but saw only the fire flickering back to life behind the sedges and heard Sigrun's shout Tuuri's name. He pulled his coat open and set the needle, silver against his black uniform sweater, against his chest, pushing in.

The Swan rose into the sky, winging him after her. 

Lalli flew.

**Author's Note:**

> Many thanks to Kiraly for all her help and cheer through writing this, always. Turns out writing darkfic is a lot harder than I thought. And Laufey deserves accolades of her own for putting up with all the harebrained questions about Finnish mythology. I ended up taking a lot of liberties with both original mythology and its comic counterpart, plus some straightforward inventions, but I hope that all things taken together works as some sort of cohesive whole.


End file.
